Friday, September 13, 2013

Seenth.is lets music fans hone their obsession by making it easy for them to track the most interesting social media updates from their favorite performers. The iOS app (an Android version will be released later this year) aggregates and filters content from sources including Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and SoundCloud accounts of musicians and fans and presents items based on relevancy rather than chronological order, so you can see which items are likely to go viral before they do.
The Stockholm-based co-founders of Seenth.is (pronounced “seen this”) designed its algorithm to “solve the social media information overload that’s plaguing all of us,” said CMO Robert Furelid. The app soft-launched with 200 artists at the beginning of July and has grown quickly since then, with 400 additional performers added so far based on trending searches.
The idea behind Seenth.is was hatched when co-founder and head of business development Jesper Benon wanted to find concert reviews for electronic dance music trio Swedish House Mafia. While scrolling through comments left by thousands of fans on various sites, Benon began conceptualizing an app that would aggregate and sort through similar information for different artists. Seenth.is is based on tech Benon and CEO Marcus Myrberg developed for a company that provides social media monitoring services for public relation firms and other clients.
Seenth.ith’s creators intend for it to serve as a “second screen” experience to concerts or streaming music players like Spotify or Rdio. By helping its users sort through a mass of tweets, videos, photos, news articles and blog posts to find the most topical content about their favorite acts, Seenth.is hopes to stand out from other music discovery services including app Soundwave, location-based concert app Timbre or musician profile Web site BandPage.
Seenth.is currently has three main features. The Artist Feed gathers together all the different social media channels used by one performer or group, while the Fan Feed aggregates and filters online chatter from their listeners. Real-time updates from concerts appear in the Live Feed. The Explore window adds a discovery element by recommending new acts based on the genres and artists you have followed. You can save items from different feeds by starring it. Seenth.is’ next update will include a new feed that collects all your starred content in one feed and a more intuitive Explore window.
Furelid says the Seenth.is team is currently focusing on expanding the app’s roster of artists and cementing collaborations with musicians and DJs (he can’t disclose partners yet, but says fans can probably guess by following the app’s Facebook and Twitter feeds). Seenth.is is currently bootstrapped and has already launched its monetization model, which inserts ads into feeds and allows artists to participate in a revenue-sharing model.